


Golden Ticket

by Selden



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Beverly Lives, F/F, Good things for Abigail Hobbs, Hannibal doesn't, Or at least fewer bad things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-19
Updated: 2015-04-19
Packaged: 2018-03-24 16:53:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3776185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/pseuds/Selden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abigail Hobbs can raise the dead.</p><p>One person from the dead, to be precise.</p><p>She brings back Beverly Katz.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Golden Ticket

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosedamask](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosedamask/gifts).



> Damask_and_dark, thank you so much, first of all, for an absolutely marvellous prompt. 
> 
> I hope that stealing about a quarter of a conceit from another corner of the Fuller-verse, _Pushing Daisies_ , doesn't smack too much of a crossover, or take too much away from Abigail's canon characterisation. 
> 
> I should say as well that the quotation at the beginning is scene-setting only: Salem makes no further appearances (though I do wonder if that is where Fuller and co got Abigail's name).
> 
> I've also implicitly reworked one canon detail, taking it in the direction Fuller talks about in [this](http://www.avclub.com/article/hannibals-bryan-fuller-rebooting-season-two-halfwa-203515) AV Club episode walkthrough.
> 
> \---

 

I was a discorsing with Abigaill Hobbs about her wicked cariges and disobedience to hir father and Mother and she tould me she did not care what any body said to hir for she had seen the divell and had made a covenant or bargin with him.    

 

“Deposition of Priscilla Chub v. Abigail Hobbs,” in Bernard Rosenthal et al., eds., _Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 193. _  
_

 

* * *

 

 

 

When Abigail Hobbes was twelve years old, her mother told her she could raise the dead.

"Just one time," said her mom. "It's a one-time thing." She looked as if she might be about to laugh. "It runs," she said, "in our family."

They were sitting at the kitchen table with the fat little owl-shaped salt and pepper shakers in front of them, right in the middle of the table. A tiny drift of cheap salt was caked down the wing of the owl on the left, each white translucent granule like a bug's tiny egg.

"Any kind of dead person?" asked Abigail. "Even if they're decomposing. Or just bones?" She had been reading about Lady Jane Grey.

"I don't actually know," said her mom. "I guess the body probably needs to be quite recent."

"Do the people come back normal? Or are they zombies or something?"

"What?" Her mom sounded almost angry. "No. No, they come back just like they were. Even if they were really badly hurt."

Abigail caught a bit of salt under the flat of her thumbnail, as if she was squashing a tick. If you caught them just right, you could crush them to something that looked like powdered sugar. But the grain skated out and hit the sleeve of her mother's pink cardigan.

"Don't let anyone see you do it," said her mother. "Don't tell anyone you can. They'd think you were lying, or ill. This isn't some kind of superpower." She laid out her hands flat on the table top, neat fingers with a bump in the middle one on her right hand from holding a pen. "You just need to touch them, though. It's like a laying on of hands, I guess. You have to want it, though. Really want it. And you get just one chance, remember that. One person."

Abigail's favorite superhero was still Rogue, but she'd stopped reading comic books a year back. She looked sideways at her mom. "Is this some kind of test?" she asked. "Or a really weird joke." Sometimes her dad set her tests, when they were hunting. But her mom never had.

Her mom's hands curled up in on themselves. "Oh, honey," she said. "Honey no. Let me tell you about it properly."

Abigail looked up out of the kitchen windows. They went round a corner, and were so wide that it was like you were in a ship. Outside, the trees made a sound like long hair.

 

\---

 

"Holy _fuck_ ," said Beverly Katz, sitting up in a hospital bed. "Holy fucking shit."

Two doors down, in a room with a bored guard dozing outside the door, Abigail Hobbs lay still, her breathing steady. Only the uptick in her heart monitor would have shown an observer that she'd woken up. No-one would ever know that she'd woken at the precise moment that Beverly Katz had opened her eyes.

 

\---

 

The body sat at a cafe table, hands resting on the table in front of it, palms up. Between the hands rested a cup of tea, stone cold. A thread of blood curled through the milky liquid, turning it slowly, steadily, a muddy pink. And in each palm rested an eyeball, brown iris looking up.

Above the body's empty eyes, from holes hacked into its skull, rose antlers, strung delicately from the ceiling by transparent fishing line.

The body was that of a young woman, with a plain but pretty face and dark brown hair.

 

\---

 

"I want to see her," said Beverly.

"I can't authorize that, Beverly," said Jack Crawford, sitting back in the too-low hospital chair like he was holding court behind his desk at the FBI. "After what happened with Miriam Lass, I've been advised to keep Abigail in a stable environment. Minimal disruption."

"She's still not talking to you, is she," said Beverly.

Slowly, Jack shook his head.

"She's not even talking to Will?"

"Will doesn't know about her reappearance, Beverly, and I would appreciate it if it remained that way."

"Are you serious?" asked Beverly. "I thought he'd been cleared. What _happened_ while I was out?"

"When you and Abigail reappeared, Will was in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. When Will was released, both of you were in a deep coma. There was nothing to suggest that informing him of your situation would give him anything besides false hope."

From her hospital bed, Beverly looked down at Jack. As ever, his face looked like an Olmec stone head, monumental. Igneous. It also looked tired. Tired and desperate.

"You're sending Will after him again, aren't you?" she said flatly. "On our account. Mine and Abigail's."

Jack said nothing. Above them both, the shiny balloon Zeller and Price had brought bobbed gently, sending a coin of light swaying round the walls. The flowers on her bedside table filled the air with a greenish, soapy scent. Aldehydes.

"You've put Will out there again, after what happened the last time. What, is he baiting Lecter? Is he the lure? You say that my testimony isn't enough to go on, but what more do you want? He can clean out his secret murder basement, but he can't demolish it!"

Jack shook his head. "Beverly, both you and Abigail have been subject to some kind of severe trauma. Severe enough to land you in a coma for weeks. Miriam Lass is evidence enough that the Ripper is adept at psychological manipulation, that eyewitness accounts are insufficient."

"You think he got inside my head?" said Beverly. "In what, a night? How far do you think he's got inside Will's head, then?"

"The Ripper was invested enough in you personally to create some kind of elaborate mock-up of your body, Beverly," said Jack heavily. "Abigail was found on the site holding you in her arms, but we have no idea how she got there. It's very unlikely she could have carried you up the steps of the observatory on her own. And the Ripper's" - he paused delicately - "The Ripper's installation was reduced to powder. No trace of explosives that we could discover. Not a scratch on either of you. In the time it took police and technicians at the site to respond to a burning car. I don't think it's probable that Abigail Hobbs got there on her own, do you?"

Beverly shook her head. "Will always said she had guts," she said. "At least let me get back into the lab, if not the field. I'm going stir crazy in here."

"I'm sorry, Beverly," said Jack, dusting off his knees and getting up. "I truly am."

"But this is for my own good, right?" Beverly smiled as wryly as she knew how. "Send in Price and Zeller if they're still waiting, would you? They promised they'd bring me delicious concession-stand pastries."

 

\---

 

"Hair," said Price. "Blood, tissue. Visual examination suggested some kind of post-mortem kidney transplant going on." He peered at Beverly. "Did I say blood?"

"You were in slices," said Zeller. "Or, not you, I guess. I don't get how the Ripper did it. Slices!"

"Shut up, Zeller," said Price.

"But do you have the workups?" said Beverly. "I want to see the data."

Zeller shrugged, producing a sheaf of printouts from his bag. "It's unambiguous," he said. "All the samples we took before you and Hobbs turned up. All you. The Ripper did a really thorough job."

"Who would have thought Chilton had it in him?" said Price. "If indeed he did. Is that a man-bag?"

Beverly tuned out the sound of them bickering as she flicked through the pages. There she was. All of her. She shuffled them back together and looked up brightly. "So," she said, "what can you tell me about the girl with antlers?"

Price and Zeller exchanged glances.

"You're not meant to have internet access here," said Price cautiously.

"Yep," said Beverly, whose sister had slipped her a smart phone the day after she'd woken up. "I know. What can you tell me?"

"Nothing that wasn't already on every wannabe TattleCrime out there," said Zeller bitterly. "Nothing much, anyway. Zoe Hardwick, 20, college student. No traces at the scene, no likely suspect. No discernible motive."

"Holding up her eyes in her hands like St Lucy," said Price. "Tongue at the bottom of her cup of tea; that's a new one."

"Actually," said Zeller, "at least three Catholic saints are recorded as having had their tongues pulled out. Not to mention St Apollonia. Patron saint of dentists for a reason."

"A fortune down amongst the tea leaves," said Beverly thoughtfully. "It's a prognostication. A warning."

"And the antlers?" asked Price. "She'd been cuckolded?"

"A bit pagan for St Lucy," said Zeller. "Very Cernunnos. Herne the Hunter."

"Or the hunted," said Beverly. "Very Cassie Boyle. Very Marissa Schurr." She thought of Abigail Hobbs, staring back at her in Lecter's basement. "See no evil," she said, "speak no evil. Tell no tales."

"She was missing her ears," said Zeller. "Hear no evil."

"Have you opened her up yet?" asked Beverley. "Bet you twenty dollars you'll find them in her stomach."

"Like Graham?" asked Price. "You think this is meant for him?"

"What does Will have to say about this, anyway?" said Beverly. "Or, don't tell me, Jack has him working another case. A bigger case."

Zeller nodded. "I should say again -" he started, grimacing.

"Yeah, yeah," said Beverly. "You should always listen to me."

A silence began to cluster in the room, seeping out from between the pages of the cheery get-well-soon cards, billowing along the polished floor. They'd gotten used to working without her, Beverly saw. Begun to scab over the wound of her loss. Sensible. Healthy.

"You know," said Price hesitantly, "we had this case recently. A dead woman sewn into the uterus of a horse."

"A dead horse," said Zeller.

" _Yes_ , a dead horse. Turned out the sewing part was this fellow who'd been kicked in the head by a horse."

"A live horse."

"He was doing it to bring her back. Some kind of sympathetic magic. And the thing is," said Price.

"The ridiculous thing," said Zeller.

"The thing is that he'd opened her up too, right to the heart. Put a bird inside it. A starling." He paused, rubbing the back of his neck. "Gave us the shock of a lifetime when we opened her up. It was as though her heart was beating. The bird was alive, you see. But Graham says that head-kicked guy swears blind it wasn't when he sewed it in. Flew into a window, he says. Bam. 'The shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the window-pane'."

"It was a starling," said Zeller. "For fuck's sake."

"And that was Nabokov," said Beverly. "What, this bird came back from the dead?"

Price shrugged.

"Well," said Zeller, "the woman sure didn't."

 

\---

 

When Zeller and Price had gone, leaving a greasy paper plate loaded with unhealthy foodstuffs balanced on her bedside table, Beverly turned to her window. Inside, the pastries were fighting the smell of the flowers with cinnamon and fake vanilla. Outside, the prim lines of an institutional balcony sectioned a pale blue sky. Somewhere quite near by, down where trees in the hospital parking lot were fizzy with spring green, magpies were chattering.

Medieval accounts exist in which the noise of magpies is understood to be the sound of souls in Purgatory, she heard Price saying. Not standing diffidently in a hospital room, but back in her lab, the air sweetly indolic with slow-motion decay, rough with chemicals. Zeller would bounce back something about visions of the suffering dead, come up from the pit in gravecloths to beg for a parcel of prayers, and they'd bend back over their latest corpse, one step further along in their little flirtation. Briefly, her mind's eye supplied the body's face; its long black hair. _Shema Yisroel_ . She shook her head.

"You can come in, Abigail," she said to the open window. "Let me know if you need a hand."

Outside, under the magpie's yelling, there was a pointed silence. Then a scuffle, like someone climbing over from the balcony of the empty room next door. By the time Abigail Hobbs had, with some difficulty, climbed in through the window, Beverly was holding out the plate of sticky pastries like a peace offering.

"For a secure treatment facility," Beverly said, "this really isn't."

Abigail stood uncertainly by the window, shaking her head a little at the pastries. She'd left a smear in the dirt on the window as she climbed in, clouding the view. She was dressed, in jeans and jacket and even, neatly tied, a scarf. Her hair covered the soft, ragged edge of her missing ear.

Beverly sighed and put the plate down. "I'm sorry," she said, "we haven't really been properly introduced. I'm Beverly Katz. Pleased to meet you, Abigail Hobbs." She gestured to the chair by her bed. "Do sit down. Mi casa, and so on."

Abigail remained standing, keeping the chair between herself and the bed. Her eyes darted to Beverly's face and away again.

"Striking, isn't it," said Beverly. "Odd how nobody's mentioned it."

"I'm sorry," said Abigail, her voice a little rough. "I should go. I shouldn't have come."

Beverly swung herself clumsily half out of bed and put out her hand. "Abigail. Wait. At least let me say thank you."

Abigail shook her head and stepped backwards. "You don't know," she said. "You can't see."

"I can see I'm not in slices," said Beverly. "You know," she said thoughtfully, "I used to hate Sherlock Holmes. Solving problems with a Lion's Mane jellyfish in one hand and a pipe in the other."

Abigail, for a moment, stopped looking pale and blank and looked quizzical instead. "That's not exactly what happens," she said.

"Yeah, yeah," said Beverly. "It might as well have. Except for the times he had Doctor Watson in one hand and a syringe of cocaine solution in the other, I guess. But if there's one thing working with Will Graham taught me, it's that once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how goddamn improbable, must be the truth. That and how to get used to the smell of dog in a workplace environment."

Abigail, holding on to the back of the chair, smiled dutifully. 

Swing and a miss, thought Beverly. She clenched her left hand in front of her, watched it open and shut. "You heard what Jack Crawford had to say," she said. "And Price and Zeller."

"He's sending me a message," said Abigail. "A threat." She looked down at her hands. "Another girl died because of me."

"Another girl died because of Hannibal Lecter, actually," said Beverly crisply. "You just saved a woman's life, Abigail Hobbs. You want to fill me in on the details, by the way?"

"Not really," said Abigail.

"At least tell me whose kidneys I've got inside me? They must be working, since I haven't died of renal failure, but I'd like to have some idea. Please tell me they didn't come from James Gray."

"He said they came from a fellow artist," said Abigail. "That's all I know."

"Great," said Beverly. "Just great. Evil kidneys. I guess Lecter's served mine up to the great and good of Baltimore by now."

"Probably," said Abigail. "He likes offal."

Beverly swallowed. "Yeah, I figured. That was some pantry. Look, Abigail," she said, "you want to make sure Hannibal Lecter doesn't get to kill anyone else? Talk to Jack. Don't talk to Will, because I've got Zeller's login details and the lab reports on his extracurricular activities are pretty hair-raising. Don't go running back to Lecter because he painted you some St Lucy's day nocturne. I don't know what he did to you, but I know you got out. I know you came to find me."

"The door wasn't locked in the first place," said Abigail. "After the first few weeks, anyway. I could have left at any time."

Beverly, sitting on the edge of her bed, looked up at Abigail. Her pale face was composed, concentrated. As if she was figuring out a math problem, or running through the periodic table in her head. Perhaps she was. "Hey, Abigail," she said. "You did leave. I've seen the report on your blood work. It's a marvel you could stand up, let alone break through whatever mind-whammy Lecter put on you."

"Mind-whammy?"

"Technical term," said Beverly. "I'm a crime scene investigator, not a psychologist. I get inside dead people's chest cavities, not live people's heads." She poked a finger into the frosting on a cinnamon roll, sweetly yielding as the skin of a month-old cadaver. "You're going to go after Lecter, aren't you?"

Abigail said nothing.

"Well," said Beverly, "I'm coming with. Wait while I get some clothes on, would you?"

Abigail smiled thinly, turning to look out of the window. Two magpies had landed on the balcony railing, tipping their bright black heads and squawking at each other. "I know you are," she said. "Two for sorrow."

Beverly looked over at the magpies. "Three for a girl, actually," she said, pointing at another bird coming in to land in a great ruffle of green-glancing feathers. She levered herself slowly off the bed and went to find her clothes.

 

 

* * *

 

When Abigail Hobbs was fifteen years old, her grandmother told her to let the dead stay buried.

"Your mother's told you, hasn't she," said the old woman, shiny hands nobbled on the flowery bed-spread. "I understand her thinking, but it's a hard thing to do to a child. And it's a hard thing to do to a person, to bring them back."

"When it's their time to go?" asked Abigail.

Her grandmother's face split in a pumpkin grin. "It's my opinion that nobody has a time set apart for them," she said. "No, it's my understanding that the dead don't take well to life. Though I must admit, my sample size is very small."

"Who did you bring back?" asked Abigail. 

Her grandmother turned her sharp gaze on Abigail. Old age had watered down the brown of her eyes until the irises seemed almost transparent, like tea mixed with vinegar. "A boy on the road to Duluth," she said. "I was twenty and a good Samaritan, and I would never have regretted it if I hadn't seen his picture in the paper five years later."

"Why did that make you regret it?" asked Abigail.

But her grandmother knotted her hands into each other and stayed silent.

"So you don't think I should ever do it?" asked Abigail.

"You should remember," said her grandmother, "that it's a hard thing to do to yourself, as well, my dear. And you should remember that you can undo, if you must, what you have undone."

 

Abigail's mother came to fetch her after that, and they went and ate squeaky poutine in a restaurant that smelled of floor polish. Later she would try and find the boy from the road to Duluth, leaning over a microfiche reader like an enormous periscope in the local library, reading about long-ago flower competitions and Dairy Princesses and Murderers of Five, but she could never pin him down for certain, and her grandmother died before she could ask her again.

 

 

* * *

 

 

"Striking," said Beverly Katz to herself in the mirror. "Slice and dicing." She smiled grimly at herself, watching the thin white line of scar tissue that ran down the middle of her face, the line to the other side of her eye, the line that just caught the edge of her ear. 

She thought of Jack, sitting down out of a direct line of sight, of Zeller and Price, bouncing banter off each other, standing at just the right angle to catch her good side. She thought of Abigail Hobbs, with her neat little scarf and her missing ear. 

Then she thought how memorable she'd be to anyone who noticed the scars. Her little sister had brought her makeup bag; it took hardly any time to cover her face with enough foundation that the scars were nearly invisible. She finished making up her face automatically. The new little ridge at the corner of one eye was almost impossible to feel. Without makeup, people would think industrial accident, perhaps. Possibly self-harm. People who hadn't been in that observatory, that is, seeing right down her center.

"You look nice," said Abigail, looking in through the open washroom door. 

Beverly shrugged. "Perks of having a private hospital room," she said. "Space to primp."

"You can't see the scars at all," said Abigail. "I wish I could do makeup that well, that quickly."

"When all this is over, I'll give you a private tutorial," said Beverly, swinging her bag onto her back. "Now, please tell me those balconies aren't too difficult to climb along."

 

\---

 

Climbing along the balconies with arms and legs that felt like wet string was nearly impossible. But once they'd made it back in, squeezing through a window into an unguarded corridor, walking out was insultingly easy. 

So was getting a taxicab to her apartment, picking up her laptop and all the cash she could find, and unsticking her spare gun from behind the back of the garbage disposal. Beverly was on tenterhooks every second in case Abigail was telling the cab to drive on or Hannibal Lecter was about to step out, spruce as always, from behind a lamp or a settee or a pile of unopened mail, but she stepped out of her apartment building to find Abigail making polite small talk with the driver. Beverly slammed the door behind her and gave him directions. 

"I hope you like seedy motels, Abigail," she said, as they turned the corner into the parking lot of the Sunshine Ridge Inn, out along the freeway right next to a car rental spangled with flashing yellow neon.

 

Once they were settled in room 109, with a crummy car waiting outside, a chunk taken out of Beverly's emergency cash, and a scattering of candy bars thrown across both springy single beds, Abigail was a model roommate. She sat on her bed eating a Hershey bar in total silence, flipping through the manual for their rental car, while Beverly paged through report after report under Zeller's password.

"I'm not running in without a plan again," she had told Abigail, expecting mulishness or flat-out defiance. "That didn't go great the first time." 

But Abigail had just nodded and sat down, bouncing a little on the dingy covers of her starchy little bed. The pink shade on the overhead light gave her face back its bloom. Very Mall of America, Beverly heard Will Graham saying, looking down at the face of Elise Nichols. American Girl. Catalog material.  


Abigail, looking up, gave a reassuring little smile.

And when Beverly, staring at Randall Tier's face hooked onto a skeleton, almost certain that this was Will, fly-fishing with a very big and fancy lure indeed, felt suddenly rather ill and closed her laptop with a thump, Abigail was there at once, looking up smiling.

"Are you feeling ok, Beverly?" she asked. "You should probably still be in the hospital."

Beverly stared across at Abigail, tired and sick to her stomach. "You've done this before, haven't you," she said. "Made friends. You're good at it. Or good enough. You did it for all of them, didn't you. All eight of them. Your father asked you to. Or he told you to. And you gave him, what, names and addresses? Times and places?"  


 

Blankness fell over Abigail's face like a night's worth of snow. Outside, sirens came and went. The portion of sky between their window curtains was litmus-blue with oncoming evening.

"What about Nicholas Boyle?" asked Beverly. "I examined him myself. He was gutted like a pig. Or a deer, I guess."

The blankness had melted away as she spoke. Now Abigail sat with her head at an angle, radiating earnest attentiveness. It was the expression you wore when you were trying to get clever older men to tell you things. Beverly found herself wondering how well it had worked on Freddy Lounds. She knew it had worked on Will. Perhaps even on Hannibal Lecter, for a while.

"Are you still going to help me?" Abigail asked. "Jack Crawford thinks all of that already, you know."

Beverly rolled her eyes. "For fuck's sake, Abigail," she said. "Your dad told you it was them or you, right? I am right, aren't I? I'm not going to say anything about this to Jack. I just want to have all the facts. Or as many of them as aren't jellyfish, anyway."

Abigail blinked at her. 

"Returning from the dead is a jellyfish," said Beverly impatiently. "I'll let Sherlock Holmes have that one. Being forced into an untenable position by a parental figure, that's a whole lot closer to a fact. I can work with that. Gutting a man who terrified you at the site of a profound earlier trauma, that's not much of a jellyfish either. Give me those and I'll go from there."

Abigail bent forwards, hugging her arms around herself, as if she was curling up around a cramp. When she lifted her face again, her eyes were dark. "Nicholas Boyle wasn't going to kill me," she said. "Nobody would have believed it was self-defence."

"Hannibal Lecter tell you that?"

"I could have brought him back, though," said Abigail thinly. "But I couldn't make myself want to."

"Is that all you need to do?" asked Beverly, fascinated. "Want to?"

Abigail hugged herself tighter. "You get just one chance," she said. "One person. It runs in our family."

"X or Y?" asked Beverly. "I mean, from your mom or dad?"

"My mom," said Abigail. 

"That's - damn." Beverly shook herself. She looked up and grimaced. "Sorry," she said. "I mean, thank you. You chose me, right, in the end. Like a Pokémon!"

Abigail took this with unexpected solemnity. "Yeah," she said. "Just like that." She uncrossed her arms and looked around the room, at the curtains the color of raw trout and the painting over the bed, flowers faded into liver-spot blobs by the sun. "It wasn't my dad's fault, you know," she said. "'Murderer of Five Caught in Minneapolis'."

"What the hell does that mean?" asked Beverly. But her phone rang before Abigail could answer.

 

"Beverly," said Zeller. "I knew it. Beverly, are you out of that hospital? Did you take the Hobbs girl? Because we're here right now, and both the guards are dead."

At the sight of Beverly's expression, Abigail got up and flattened herself against the wall by the window, looking sideways past the curtains at the darkening parking lot.

Zeller kept on talking. "It's a mess here," he said. "And I just got a call from the IGO. They've put Crawford on forced compassionate leave, effective immediately. Beverly, don't tell me where you are, ok. But you are ok, right?"

There was a scuffle on the end of the line, and Price's voice came on the phone. "I know you've been looking at Zeller's files," he said. "But they don't really give you any idea. Crawford is going to go for Lecter anyway, I couldn't be more certain. And Graham could be _with_ Lecter for all I can tell. Keep your head down, Beverly. And don't trust the Hobbs girl. Miriam Lass was normal, right up until she wasn't."

"Thanks, guys," said Beverly. "We're fine." 

Before she could say anything else, the line went dead. 

 

She lowered the phone, slowly. She could have called in a warning to the guards. Hit the fire alarm as she was leaving. She could have knocked out Abigail Hobbs as soon as they'd left the hospital, not set off on some _Folie_ à _deux_ with a damaged nineteen-year-old. She could have called for backup when she broke into Lecter's house. She could come apart right now, she thought, along her neat white seams.

"They're going for him, aren't they," said Abigail, still looking out of the window. Jack Crawford and Will. He wants them to. That's why he killed Zoe Hardwick. He wants me to come so that he can -"

Beverly waited, watching Abigail's face in the light from the freeway.

"What does it feel like to die?" Abigail asked.

Beverly shrugged. "It feels like being choked unconscious," she said. "But I'm working from a very small sample size."

For some reason, this of all things made Abigail laugh, an ugly hiccupping sound.

"I can remember what it feels like to come together, though," said Beverly. "Like walking under stained glass, except it hurts."

"He says that God likes dropping church roofs on people," said Abigail, voice still unsteady.

Beverly shook her head regretfully. "And that's a beautiful set-up for a Jewish joke that I'm gonna be strong and reserve for later. An incentive for not dying, if you will." She looked across at Abigail. "What's your incentive?" she asked.  


"For not dying?" Abigail's ugly little laugh came back. "I used to want to join the FBI."

Beverly sucked in a breath through her teeth. "Yeah," she said. "No way you'd pass the screening."

"I know," said Abigail lightly. "I said 'used to'."

"Will Graham didn't pass the screening either," said Beverly, "and look where that's got him."

"Yeah," said Abigail, "look."

"You know what I mean," said Beverly. "You know, when all this is over, forget getting back in the saddle. I'm going on fucking vacation. Road Trip USA. I guess I'm not going to get to gumshoe it Elmore Leonard style, but I sure as fuck have confidence in my ability to Kerouac it." That, she saw, got half a smile. "You should come," she said. "Hell, I'll even wait until you've completed whatever course of therapeutic treatment they're going to throw at you. We'll go see that giant ball of twine and eat pizza in New York. I'll drag you to visit all the weirdos I knew in college, and we'll have to keep explaining that you're not actually my much younger girlfriend. It'll be a blast."

Abigail had stopped looking out of the window, Beverly saw. She looked for an instant like a normal teenager, puzzled and a little eager.

"You're gay?" she asked.

"Well, bi," said Beverly. "But who's counting, right?"

Abigail shook her head. "Nicholas Boyle said I probably chatted up his sister. All the girls my father killed. That I helped him kill."

"Did you?"

"I don't think so," Abigail said. "I just talked to them."

"Yeah," said Beverly, "I think we can knock that off the list of stuff you need to worry about." She stood up, brushing her hands together. "What did Lecter want you to do, Abigail? What can you remember?"

"He wanted me to leave. With him and Will. He talked about San Marco in Florence. About the monks' cells painted by Fra Angelico. It was a kind of joke, because of where I was."

"Lecter wants to go on vacation too. And he's a dick, but we knew that already."

"He wants to make a new life, he said. I think he's bored here."

"Well," said Beverly, "new life is actually your speciality." She slid her gun out of its holster and checked the chamber. "I'm going to try and kill Lecter, just so you know."

"I know," said Abigail. "That's really why I brought you back. It seemed like you nearly would, in the basement. I wanted you to get a second chance. I wanted you to be a stranger in the road." She tugged at the scarf round her neck. "You won't be able to stop, though, most likely. That's what being brought back does to you."

Beverly swallowed. "Why do you think that, Abigail?"

"'Murderer of Five Caught in Minneapolis'", she said, singsong. "He strung body parts across the street on washing lines. And 'The Minnesota Shrike'. I wonder what they'll call you?"

"Your mom bought your dad back?" asked Beverly.

"When I was twelve. She never really said, but it was obvious."

"And the other guy? Murderer of Five?"

"My grandmother. Most likely, anyway. She died before I could ask her whether he was really the one."

 

Beverly let out a breath and sat back down on the slippery bed. She patted the coverlet to her left, where she'd have Abigail's good ear. Hearing loss could be substantial, she could hear Zeller saying. Some distortion inevitable. "C'mon," she said. "Come and sit here for a second."

Slowly, Abigail complied. "Aren't you mad?" she said. "I just said that I raised you up as a weapon. That I made you into a monster."

"Abigail," said Beverly. "Abigail, I'm glad you were still looking for a weapon back then. Yeah? That's not what Lecter wanted. That means he didn't get all the way inside your head. It's gonna sound weird and maybe kind of report-card-ish, but I'm really proud of you. I'm glad I got to meet you."

Outside, heavy rain was coming down. Every sweep of headlights filled the gap in the curtains with dazzle.

"And as for the came-back-murderous thing," she went on, "I'm going to ask you to take a lot on trust. I don't know about the guy your grandmother brought back. But back when your father died, I was in charge of checking up on your family's police records. And the only thing I found was a write-up of an accident your mom was in seven years ago. Black ice on the pavement, no-one's fault. Real bad for the other car. It was totalled. But the guy in it - father-of-three, civil engineer - the guy swore blind in his statement that your mom put her hands on him and raised him from the dead. It's probably one big reason I'm not a ball of epistemological angst right this very minute. I was forewarned, so to speak."

Abigail, Beverly realized, was shaking. Slowly, very slowly, she raised her arm and put it round Abigail's shoulders, resting lightly. She was reminded for a moment, wildly, of the old yawn-and-stretch trick.

"Your father died for the first time when Will Graham shot him," said Beverly. "And if I'm wrong, hell, I'm in the FBI. I can kill bad guys."

Suddenly, Abigail turned sideways, burying her face in the crook of Beverly's shoulder. She wasn't crying, just shaking as if warming up from being very cold.

"And how likely is it that everyone who stages an elaborate murder has a resurrection in their closet?" said Beverly. "You don't know of any other people like you and your mom's family, I'm guessing?"

Abigail shook her head.

"I'm not feeling suddenly possessed of any urge to string up body parts, Abigail," said Beverly. "Even Hannibal Lecter's."

"It just means that he did it all because of me," she said, muffled. "I still killed Nicholas Boyle with a gutting knife."

"He did it all because of him, Abigail," said Beverly, holding on. "But, yes, you did."

Abigail made as much of a shrug as she could with her face mashed into Beverly's shoulder. Then she sat back up and straightened her scarf. "Let's go," she said, "and kill Hannibal Lecter."

 

\---

 

Beverly drove past blocks of high-gabled row houses far too fast, the stolid shapes of moneyed Baltimore flickering between windshield wipers.

"I want you to watch my back in there, Abigail," said Beverly. "You did put on his knowledge with his power, yeah? You know better than anyone what he's capable of. Better than me."

"We did Yeats in senior year," said Abigail. "That's kind of tasteless." She smiled a little. "But then Hannibal does have a painting of Leda and the Swan over the fire in his dining room."

"For a creature of such refined sensibilities," said Beverly, swinging round a corner in a sheet of spray, "Lecter is on occasion cheesy as fuck."

She drew up at an angle outside Lecter's townhouse. Rain was sluicing down like sugar in the streetlights, and the front door was left half-open. Over the rain came the sound of shots.  


"Call an ambulance, now," said Beverly, tossing Abigail her phone. "Right now."

 

Beverly skidded into an upstairs corridor just in time to see Alana Bloom lower her gun.

"Beverly?" she said quietly. "Beverly Katz?"

"Ms Katz," said Hannibal Lecter's voice. "How very extraordinary to meet you again. It seems my protégé has some rare talents, does it not?"

Alana Bloom was fumbling in her bag for ammunition. "Come on," she was muttering. "Come on, come on."

"You wear it well, Ms Katz," called Hannibal. "How fine a thing it is to have been meat, and now be flesh. You should make the most of it."

Beverly fired at the sound of his voice, suddenly acutely aware of how even in the inside of her mouth she could feel the little ridges of scarring, the lines where she'd been taken apart.

"You come now with the cuts already marked out, Ms Katz."

Beverly kept her breathing steady. Alana Bloom was fumbling the cartridges home, swearing under her breath.

In the basement, it had been from behind, a horror-film rush of movement taking Beverly off her feet. Lecter hit Alana from the side, driving her head into the hardwood floor and sending her gun skittering away into the dark. She lay still, breathing ragged. Beverly fired once, twice, feet apart, stance steady. But he was gone.

"Where is he," said Abigail from behind her. "Where is he, Beverly?"

"Stay close," Beverly whispered. One of her shots had taken out a window-pane; rain and wind were gusting in, sending the long curtains billowing.

"Abigail, Abigail," came Hannibal's voice, soft this time and forgiving. "My prodigal daughter. Do you remember, Abigail? Do you remember what we talked about?"

The house hissed and swayed around them like a tall ship, and Beverly turned and fired again at nothing more than a vase, rolling out from the shadows.

"Did you appreciate my gift to you, Abigail? Zoe Hardwick, I believe. A Lucy to remind you of the light in dark days."

"Come out, Lecter," Beverly yelled. "You piece of shit. You ate my fucking kidneys!"

Abigail, she realized, was no longer behind her. But Lecter was.

She spun and fired, falling, and Lecter's right ear shattered into rags of flesh. He was bleeding already, she saw with the strobe-flash clarity of adrenaline. Cartoonish lines of blood from his nostrils. Pivoting, driving his arm to her chest. She could smell the basement again; bleach and hanging meat. And Abigail sitting in the corner, in her teenage-girl's cell, emptied plate on the floor at her feet.

Lecter's elbow hit her ribcage, palm aiming up for her chin. A knockout blow. It had worked in the basement. She fired almost blind, slamming her shoulder back into the floor with the recoil, kicking away blindly across the floor.

Hannibal's elegant surgeon's hand, she saw with some satisfaction as she struggled to her feet, was a bloody ruin.

"Perhaps young Abigail will put me together again?" he suggested, pulling down a bookcase between them for cover.

Beverley fired again and again, her arm numb, shredded pages filling the air. She fired at Lecter, snaking in front of her, until she heard the click of an empty chamber.

Then she saw Abigail, off to her right, Alana's gun in her hands, facing down a lit corridor. With Lecter there, suddenly, a dark figure against bright light, walking towards them saying Abigail's name.

 

Beverly could never tell, afterwards, whether she had truly heard an urbane voice at her ear say abruptly, "I think not, as it happens," before Abigail fired.

Certainly, when Will Graham came down the corridor, mouth open in a black little O, it was Hannibal Lecter's body that lay at Abigail's feet. It was Hannibal Lecter's body that Will gathered up, mouth pulled wide by grief like a fish on a hook.

"Don't look, Abigail," said Beverly. "This you don't need to see."

But Abigail knelt in the blood with both hands on Hannibal Lecter's arm until the EMTs pulled her away. Trying, Beverly knew, to want it enough.

As the sirens came closer, she kept her own hand clamped on Abigail's shoulder. Wanting, herself, in a rush like the fall of a great church roof, wanting Abigail to be able to let go.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

When Abigail Hobbs was nineteen years old, she raised the dead and killed a devil.

In time, she would grow to be proud of the first, and the peculiar pain of the second, sharp and strange as a feathered fish hook, would grow blunt with the rub of the years.

In time she would drink beer with Will Graham, his wife and dogs, his mouth taking up her turn of speech like a fish takes a lure. But she would never again call him father, in his dreams or hers.

In time she would see less often Hannibal Lecter, shirtfront red and wet, standing up in front of her and saying, "See."

 

When Abigail Hobbs was twenty-two years old, she went on a road trip with a dead woman. She ate pizza in New York and saw the world's biggest ball of twine through a stinking hangover. She had a blazing row with Beverly Katz that got them thrown out of the oldest authentic diner car in Maine, and she ate beignets in New Orleans under a night-snowfall's worth of powdered sugar. Beverly made up a different story for her scars in every state they drove through. Alien abduction. The Jersey Devil. Robbing a cursed grave.

"I'm trying out jellyfish," she told Abigail. "But I think in the end I'll stick with pollen samples. They look strange enough for anyone, if you magnify them enough."

"You're a horrible example," said Abigail. "How am I supposed to pick a major with this kind of vacillation as a background influence?"

"I'll let you have a go with the shiniest centrifuge when we get back?"

"Thanks," said Abigail dryly. "Psychology it is, then."

Eyes on the road, Beverly lifted one hand from the wheel for a high-five. But Abigail ended up holding it instead, for a little while.

Over their heads, the summer sky stretched seamless and Cherenkov blue.

 

When Beverly introduced Abigail to her friends from college, Abigail stepped in and told them that they were kind of dating.

"Trying it out," she said, hand in Beverly's back pocket. "We'll see."

 

 

 


End file.
